Rating the Reboots: Best and Worst of DC Comics’ ‘New 52′

After enduring unhealthy doses of marketing and a head-spinning month of rebooted first issues, Wired.com's verdict on DC Comics' New 52 is in.

The good news? The New 52 dominated sales in September, with its expansive retooling of its characters pushing DC past perennial competitor Marvel Comics for the first time in nearly a decade. The bad news? Thanks to its sprawling series roster, the New 52 reboot campaign barely came in average in the narrative ambition department.

Overweight with everything from expository diarrhea and clichéd archetypes to outright misogyny and misguided "upgrades" (Wonder Woman has a dad?), the majority of the New 52 titles squandered a boatload of cultural capital.

When the first issues arrived in September, we were ecstatically looking forward to how DC would revise everything from its characters' costumes to their reason for being. By the time the month's deluge ended, we were almost spiritually exhausted by the stunning lack of imagination.

Well, not entirely. Five of the comics shown in the gallery above turned out to be as good as we hoped or even better (especially the cerebral psychedelia found in Jeff Lemire's astounding Animal Man). But these winners crowned the peak of an underwhelming heap dominated by middling comics peddling casual ultraviolence, post-millennial sexism and surly superheroes in search of reasons to exist in a world needing champions more than ever.

Scroll through our gallery of the best and worst of the New 52, and let us know in the comments section below if you think DC Comics' Editor in Chief Bob Harras and co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio (whose demented O.M.A.C. barely missed the cut for the best) should've worked smarter for the money.

Above:

The Good: Action Comics

The most gifted writer in comics today, Grant Morrison takes the leash off Superman and, with the kinetic artistry of Rags Morales, transforms him into a light-speed champion of the disenfranchised in this breathless reboot of DC Comics' foundational Action Comics.

There's little trace of the teen anguish, identity crises and other tired clichés that sell soap in comics and on screens to consumers with First World problems. Instead, we get a benevolent farm boy blowing past city slickers on the way to ludicrous injustice after injustice, reminding us of the reality outside the page on the way. Look at his freakish face above on the cover of Action Comics No. 2, which was released last week: Superman's so pissed that he's being tortured by Lex Luthor for trying to help people that he's about to eat his own lips.

Animal Man

From The Nobody to Sweet Tooth, we've been following the searching sci-fi dystopias of Jeff Lemire on Wired.com for a few years now. But the Canadian comics artist and writer has really upped the ante on the morphogenetic phantasmagoria of Animal Man (which is even more amazing considering that Grant Morrison more or less nailed the hero down with a legendary metafictional finale way back in the late '80s).

Lemire has taken up the challenge and, with dazzling art by Travel Foreman, turned out a supernatural original landing somewhere between the dream noir of David Lynch and the horror of Guillermo Del Toro. Bravo, indie Canadian comics brainiac. Bravo.

Batwoman

The most disturbing dimension of DC Comics' reboot campaign is the bizarre increase in culturally regressive female heroes and antiheroes. Either the DC honchos lamely forgot what century we're in, or they purposefully abandoned a valuable opportunity to win more than the scorn of female comics fans.

Demon Knights

Paul Cornell's widescreen sci-fi and fantasy gifts are so self-evident that DC Comics handed him two series, including the outer-limits Stormwatch and this self-aware supernatural romp. Demon Knights thrusts DC Comics and Vertigo's magical heroes and villains, including the Demon Etrigan, Madame Xanadu, Vandal Savage and many more, into a mad, mad, medieval world as full of dark suspense as it is saucy snark.

If we're being strict about the numbers, we'd have to put the bizarro mash of Demon Knights, whose second issue (above) arrives Wednesday, a monstrous head above the celestial mayhem of Stormwatch, whose second issue (below) arrived last week. But if we're counting Cornells, then it's a two-way tie for the top five.

Batgirl

Writer Gail Simone, who previously steered the seriously hilarious suicidal antiheroes of Secret Six for DC Comics, is spearheading the return of Batgirl.

There's plenty to like: Simone's extracted Barbara Gordon from Oracle's wheelchair and given her back the legs The Joker destroyed in Alan Moore's influential Batman: The Killing Joke. She's also managed to keep Batgirl's clothes on, a feat that is evidently very hard to pull off in the New 52.

Throw in some roommate drama and Batgirl's fearsome nemesis Mirror, and we'll run with it until the next Batgirl fan heckles DC Comics at a comic book convention.

The Bad: Red Hood and the Outlaws

Talk about a downgrade. Starfire used to be in the Teen Titans and was romantically involved with the original Robin. Now she's just poseable arm candy for Robin third-stringer Jason Todd, known now as the psychopathic Red Hood, and one-time heroin junkie Roy Harper, who goes by the cocksure name Arsenal (instead of Green Arrow's sidekick nickname, Speedy).

Starfire must have irritated someone at DC Comics severely to suffer such a devolution.

Speaking of broken time machines, Red Hood and the Outlaws is a crappy bastardization of the stunning miniseries 52, wherein Starfire found herself thrown across the bizarre universe with Animal Man and Adam Strange. Those two proved to be much more evolved companions than the bromance sandwich of Harper and Todd, both of whom have had sex with the empty receptacle Starfire before the end of the Red Hood's first issue. To paraphrase my wife, this series' sexual politics are so stunted that someone deserves to get kicked in the balls.

Catwoman

Speaking of fanboys spanking monkeys, several panels of Catwoman's first New 52 issue fly by before Selina Kyle ever gets her clothes on. Sure, the first thing Batman ever said to the Cat, as she was known back in the day, was, "Quiet or papa spank!" as he removed her disguise. But that was the '40s, meaning that little has changed in Catwoman's character in nearly a century (other than a terrible Halle Berry movie). Great.

Here's the thing: Catwoman has always been a fanboy fetish character. Having her go undercover at Russian strip clubs in the first issue, or even turn tricks in the animated adaptation of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, out Oct. 18, isn't even close to a reboot. It's a reinforcement. In the '40s, Batman threatened to spank her if she got rough. Today, he lies like a corpse as she mounts him on the first issue's final page. Even those looking for sparks once Batman and Catwoman boned in a comic ended up with a whimper instead of a bang.

Suicide Squad

Gail Simone's immortally weird Secret Six reboot took some of DC Comics' C-list villains and turned them into one of the publisher's greatest productions ever. Simone added a couple new female characters just to balance out the testosterone of Bane, Catman and Deadshot, who's the main attractor in Suicide Squad, which is nothing more than an indulgent exercise in torture pornography. (Well, him and King Shark's snazzy thong.)

Despite Shark's flashing moment of subversive brilliance, Suicide Squad's latest iteration creates only desensitized apathy instead of generating sympathy for its tortured antiheroes. Which is not a great thing, if you consider the hypersexualization of the now nearly nude Harley Quinn and even the now-glamorous Amanda Waller, the government's plus-size player who refuses to take shit from anyone, even Batman. Suicide Squad is further proof that DC Comics needs to take its hands out of its pants, post-haste.

Justice League International

Like its underwhelming A-list counterpart Justice League, whose second issue arrives Oct. 19, the bench-warmers of Justice League International prove that more superheroes doesn't yield better superhero comics. Listening to a bunch of B-listers like Ice, Guy Gardner and Vixen spend an entire issue trying to just get along would have been funny in the hero-deconstruction craze of the '80s and '90s, but it's last century's crutch in the new millennium. Even Batman can't make these supers interesting for more than a few pages.

The series gets bonus points for going global with Russia's Rocket Red, China's August General in Iron and other international characters. But it doesn't do much else than mine the supergroup's cultural differences for cheap laughs, when it could have driven a smarter dialogue about 21st-century geopolitics. (To be fair, Justice League International made this list because Justice League also shot blanks. Fingers crossed that both find their groove.)

Green Lantern

Finally, the character that DC has tried excessively hard to reboot, but with little luck. The Green Lantern live-action movie was a clumsy dud, and animated feature film Green Lantern: Emerald Knights was barely better. You can throw this standalone comics series from DC Entertainment's Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns into the mess for a sloppy trifecta, because Hal Jordan isn't even Green Lantern's central psychonaut anymore.

That role now belongs to Sinestro, who has been dominating Green Lantern's mythos ever since Johns got his hands on it years ago. Once again, the one-time villain becomes a complicated antihero, and sucks up Hal Jordan's face time without a real fight. In turn, Jordan has become a ring-less slacker whose obvious demotion probably exists as mere setup for his predictable resurgence. Which is the real problem with Green Lantern: Jordan is always surging back up from the depths of his daddy issues instead of taking readers on a tour of celestial cataclysms more suited to Earth's top space cop.

The fact that we're still reading, years later, mostly about Sinestro in a comic called Green Lantern ironically illustrates that the superhero's well feels more empty than ever under current management. Let's hope the bulletproof Bruce Timm can work his magic on Green Lantern's animated series, arriving in November.